TheOld English form has closer cognates inOld Frisian,Saxon, andNorse, whose ancestor has been reconstructed as*ainlifun. This was formerly thought to be derived from Proto-Germanic*tehun ("ten");[3][5] it is now sometimes connected with*leikʷ- or*leip- ("left; remaining"), with the implicit meaning that "one is left" after counting to ten.[3]
Copper engraving of ahendecagon, by Anton Ernst Burkhard von Birckenstein (1698)
An 11-sidedpolygon is called ahendecagon, orundecagon. A regular hendecagon is the polygon with the fewest number of sides that is not able to be constructed with a straightedge, compass, andangle trisector.[9]
In themockumentary film "This Is Spinal Tap", the idiomatic phraseup to eleven is coined to allude to going beyond typical limits, in this case guitar amplifier volume levels.
Being one hour before 12:00, theeleventh hour means the last possible moment to take care of something, and often implies a situation of urgent danger or emergency (seeDoomsday clock). "The eleventh hour" is a phrase in theParable of the Workers in the Vineyard in the Bible.
While 11 has its own name in Germanic languages such as English, German, or Swedish, and some Latin-based languages such as Spanish, Portuguese, and French, it is the first compound number in many other languages: Chinese十一shí yī, Korean열하나yeol hana or십일ship il.
^Mueller, Francis J. (1965). "More on Pascal's Triangle and powers of 11".The Mathematics Teacher.58 (5):425–428.doi:10.5951/MT.58.5.0425.JSTOR27957164.
^"hamaika".Orotariko Euskal Hiztegia (in Spanish). Retrieved25 September 2025.(Con valor indeterminado). Muchos. (Usado siempre con decl. indet.: en esta acepción el vb. concuerda tanto en pl. como, quizá algo más frecuentemente, en sing.).
^Sharp, Damian (2001).Simple Numerology: A Simple Wisdom book (A Simple Wisdom Book series). Red Wheel. p. 7.ISBN978-1-57324-560-9.
